I'm sure lots of people have read this already, but this sort of thing has been happening since 1993. (The link is to a Village Voice article called 'A Rape In Cyberspace' about sexual abuse in a text-based MUD.)
While this is an important issue, I think that it detracts from the time I have available for real-world activities that might make an improvement in the lives of millions, like building a time machine to go back and kill Baby Hitler.
Since we're living in a simulation game, does it make sense to prioritize matters in the simulation we're in, over matters in simulations we've created?
2: Has no one ever suggested killing Baby Gavrilo Princip? Baby Bismarck? Baby Frederick the Great?
The minutes of the meetings are confidential, but I can let you know that at least one of the two has been discussed.
a Village Voice article called 'A Rape In Cyberspace' about sexual abuse in a text-based MUD.
An excellent article, worth reading for anyone who hasn't.
I don't game much (and never participated in online gaming), but I'm aware that it's a huge topic in the game community.
1: Yes, this has been part of MMOs for as long as I can remember. See also the use of "teabagging" on defeated foes in multiplayer shooters, which clearly illustrates the rape-is-about-power-not-sex perspective.
Personally I'd find it much more disturbing when written out as text in a MUD than someone using an avatar /emotes non-consensually in someone else's space.
But yeah, it's awful and is one of the things that drives women away from certain kinds of games, making them more bro-ey and leading to a positive feedback loop on this kind of behavior. See also how women are discouraged from using voice chat, or use modulators to disguise their voices.
If you killed baby Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would it have prevented WWI or would everyone have started fighting in 1864 without really knowing why?
Maybe the real cause of WW1 has already been killed and Archduke Franz Ferdinand was just the weird pretext supplied by our narrative-demanding brains.
I take back 7.2. I hadn't read the article; everything is VR is a more affective experience. It must be awful.
9: Maybe Franz Ferdinand was the cause of WWI and so a time traveler killed him, and that became the new cause of WWI.
everything *in* VR. I'm not that much into the simulation perspective.
It's now believed that the hemophilia in the European royal lines came from a spontaneous mutation in the course of Victoria's conception. Hint, hint.
The "Prince Edward's Designated Hitter" hypothesis, as we'll call it from now one.
6
Julian Dibbell wrote a whole book called "My Tiny Life" about his experiences in cyberspace/MUDs and that virtual rape was a big chunk of it.
(Admins can feel free to delete this and the previous comment while cleaning up the spam.)
It's now believed that the hemophilia in the European royal lines came from a spontaneous mutation in the course of Victoria's conception. Hint, hint.
Hint, hint?
Hey baby, do you have any spontaneous mutations in you?
19 The subject of your next blogspot novel project perhaps? An H.G. Wells/Flashman mashup.
Yeah, if we decide what we're after for ameliorating the 20c by time travel is better monarchs circa 1914. No idea what no Victoria would have meant for the UK though
They'd need a new name for the train station.
I think you're underestimating Prince Albert.
Sorry, I'm sure he would have gained enough repute as a random German prince to be on the minds of 1970s body piercing pioneers.
Queen Victoria became queen because her father was the third son of George III. The first and second sons ruled as George IV and William IV respectively, but neither had legitimate children surviving; George IV's only legitimate child, Charlotte, died before her father. Victoria's father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Connaught, would therefore have been next on the throne, but he was already dead when William IV died in 1837, so his daughter became the monarch instead.
Victoria had no siblings, so we assume that in this alternative Prince Edward was childless. The crown would then have passed to his younger brother, George III's fourth son, Prince Ernest. Yes, really.
Maybe there were whole herds of German noblemen running around with two holes in their penises?
I guess that goes in the new thread.
Apart from the knock-on effect of Wilde not being able to write a play about the importance of being Ernest, the main effect here is that King Ernest I would also have been King of Hanover as well as King of the United Kingdom. As would his successor, George V. (A different bloke from the actual George V.)
King Ernest sounds like he was, to be frank, a bit of a dick. Charitably this may have been partly because he had survived being hit with a cannon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Augustus,_King_of_Hanover#Sellis_incident_and_Weymouth_controversy
On the OP, it is a weird feature of the online world that if the story had instead read "Suddenly, BigBro442's disembodied helmet faced me dead-on. His floating hand approached my body, and he started to virtually stab me to death with a large knife" this wouldn't have been surprising or shocking at all.
BigBro was on her team, so that would be a dick move and not actually do anything. Many games prevent (possibly controllable by a setting) combat between team members, so she structurally had no ability to defend herself. (And the faux virtua stabbing probably would still be shocking because the first time in VR everything is intense and shocking.)
To your actual point, one could easily say similar about paintball, or mixed martial-arts, or any combat or even contact sport. We have contexts for acceptable ritual aggression. We do not have contexts for acceptable ritual sexual assault.
We have contexts for acceptable ritual aggression.
Like traffic merge points.
Not actually trolling, just a point (I suppose fairly obvious in retrospect) that struck me as weird about the online world. Verbal aggression, offensive language etc in a virtual world would also have been unacceptable in a way that simulated physical aggression wouldn't.
What I'm hearing is that there's a space for a virtual reality name-calling game. Want to get in on this? Maybe call it Hey, Asshole!, or Fuck You, You Prick! Simulator 2017.
Although honestly verbal aggression and offensive language are entirely expected in many online gaming contexts, even if the culture at large wouldn't find it acceptable.
37 When I worked at NYPL there was a dude walking around with a sign saying something like "Give me $5 and you can call me anything" inviting abuse. I wondered if it was also a clever scam like that old silver dollar in a recent thread because I felt like giving him $5 and saying "have a nice day." Though I didn't .
What I'm hearing is that there's a space for a virtual reality name-calling game.
Definitely. Time to disrupt the rudeness sector. Except it should be AR not VR. I'm picturing a cross between Pokemon Go and the point of view shots from "Terminator" (with the drop-down menu of conversational options). You look at people through your phone camera, it overlays a list of possible insults (derived from analysis of their social media profile) and you just choose one.
HEY ASSHOLE:
--> HOW ARE THOSE XXL KHAKIS YOU BOUGHT AT 1435 YESTERDAY FROM OLDNAVY.COM WORKING FOR YOUR FAT ASS
--> SO THREE PEOPLE ACCEPTED YOUR PARTY INVITATION - HOW MANY OF THEM DID YOU HAVE TO PAY, LOSER?
--> EVERYONE HATES YOUR DOG PICTURES
--> I SEE 435 PEOPLE SWIPED LEFT ON YOU SINCE 0001 YESTERDAY. SAYS IT ALL REALLY
verbal aggression and offensive language are entirely expected in many online gaming contexts
Yes, I seem to remember that being mentioned last year, but apparently it was all about ethics in journalism?
39: Who insults the insultmen? We must bring it into our own hands. Sousinsulting.
40: I mean in the games themselves. Team chat is often a cesspool. See above about women having to disguise their voice. And let's not even talk about the stream chat on popular Twitch streams. But yeah, fair.
Another trope anticipated by Monty Python, and possibly not original with them.
39 is just perfect. There is also the point that many of the people walking in any given city street will actually already be hearing all that stuff about themselves, in their own voices, as they trudge to work ....
39- I thought up a game like this a couple years ago. But was never able to find a developer.
43 is tragic. I feel bad for even coming up with the concept now. Maybe instead we should be thinking about disrupting catcalling instead, and in a positive way. With some sort of hands-free interface, for the convenience of construction site workers.
HEY BABY:
--> NICE WORK ON THAT QUARTERLY PRESENTATION! YOU REALLY GOT THE MESSAGE ACROSS TO THE BOARD!
--> TWO OF YOUR STUDENTS JUST TEXTED EACH OTHER THAT YOU'RE THEIR FAVOURITE TEACHER! WELL DONE!
--> LOVE THE BAG! IS THAT HERMES?
31 etc.: One of the reasons why the difference in the reactions makes sense is that someone's actually feeling sexually gratified by your knowing that they are virtually groping you is a more concrete thing than their actually feeling triumphant at your knowing that they are virtually stabbing you would be.
If you and a partner physically enjoy virtual sex via avatars, it's a form of real sexual activity between the two of you, while virtual boxing via avatars is not a form of real boxing. (Likewise, having your avatar direct an insult at someone else's online can obviously sometimes be an act of real and not just pretend insult.)
NINTENDO. just, nintendo. does anyone fuck up your animal crossing village when you streetpass with them? no--first of all they kind of can't, and second they want to trade with you for your town fruit so you can mutually collect them all. is there horrible sexist abuse in multi-player splatoon? no, because you can only say two things: "c'mon," and "boo-yah." it would be useful to be able to tell your teammates to teleport to your location, or not to do so because you just got killed and they will too, or that you will camp on the enemies' spawn point while they paint things with a giant roller (the game's conceit/plot is: kid/squid hybrids play paintball). nonetheless nintendo rated the happiness and perceived safety of all players above functionality for multi-player team play. this was a correct decision. the girl inkling is way cuter than the boy and more than 50% of male players play as her. just...keep playing nintendo games. or undertale maybe.
39, 45 Clearly ajay is under contract to write the latest episode of Black Mirror and he's giving us all a taste here.
48: It took Nintendo a long time to pull that off, and they don't have it quite right. A side-effect of this is that many of their online services are poorly designed and unusable: they're entirely safe because no one uses them.
Even then, I'm not so sure. Sometimes weird stuff gets onto Miiverse (most of it clearly from children, admittedly). I love Nintendo but they have such a weird relationship with computer networks. They're trying, though.
A RELATIONSHIP IS A TWO-WAY STREET.
48 - a lot of games nowadays are upgrading their chat functions by not having one. (Blizzard's card game, Hearthstone, has a very limited chat where you can only say one of six things, and people still go into mindless rages about it.)
Scratch restricts the use of global variables to prevent anyone from hacking together a rudimentary chat system. Probably a prudent restriction.
What I'm hearing is that there's a space for a virtual reality name-calling game.
Comment Section 2016: Deluxe Troll Edition
47 is right, I guess, but it sure is weird that it is right. Why would humans be built such that proxy boxing is nbd but proxy sex or proxy insults feel real?
But really the answer is that people should stop fucking around with video games and go outside and run around.
Because one is emotional and the other is physical? Probably the more emotionally invested the boxers get, the more real it would feel.
You know, I was prepared to go all "I reject your pat and simplistic understanding! This is some complicated and bizarre thing!" but 57 seems basically right.
It's not weird to virtually stab someone in a fake game because stabbing is inherently physical. Insulting is inherently emotional. The purely physical aspect of sex still seems super fake when done virtually but the emotional part is real. Problem solved, Heebie, you are right.
I thought there would be titties, but it turns out to be mere comity.
We can't touch the virtual titties, but comity is emotional and so can be genuinely arousing.
They're virtual titties, and "Hooray!" is the only chat option.
I assume this is the case, but wanted to check with people to make it explicit- the eggplant emoji is often used to indicate a dick, right?
If a man writes the set-up for a comment that convinces a fearsome internet caudillo, but isn't around to see it happen, does it still entitle him to a bathroom-stall fist pump?
Isn't there a Community episode where Abed does this, complete with Terminator-style view?
Huh, 68 was supposed to be to 39, not the original post. Not sure how I left that out.